


The weed

by keeptheearthbelow



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, F/M, Fairy Tale Style, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-27
Updated: 2014-03-27
Packaged: 2018-01-17 04:37:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1374133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keeptheearthbelow/pseuds/keeptheearthbelow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An original fairytale about a boy who lives behind a high wall in a rose garden, and his paintings that change the course of his world. Written for the Prompts in Panem challenge "The Language of Flowers" for Queen Anne's lace = fantasy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The weed

**Author's Note:**

> My thanks to my husband for the image that's at the center of this story. He insisted he didn't warrant a mention, but seriously, the story wouldn't exist otherwise, so he deserves credit.
> 
> Warning: emotional abuse, of a sort that I view as common for fairytales, but I wanted to let you know anyway.

The barest sliver of a new moon rises above a walled garden. A woman kneels in the soil and mutters to herself. The moonlight illuminates her gray hair. The air is redolent with the scent of the roses that crowd the garden and climb the crumbling stones of the wall and the well and the cottage. The blooms are white and black and gray in the weak light. 

At the next new moon, the old woman hobbles out among the rosebushes and digs her knobby fingers into the ground where she knelt before. She unburies a hard round thing like a big winter gourd. Even with the soil brushed away, it's hard to tell if it's more like a nut or more like a stone. By the light of a candle propped in the soil, the old woman places the tip of a chisel against the unburied thing. With a few taps of a hammer, she cracks it apart. In one half of the shell is a baby. There is nothing in the other half.

Exposed to air and light, the baby squirms and makes a tiny noise. The old woman takes the baby's limbs in her frail fingers and moves them, then lifts the baby from the shell, inspecting. It's a boy; he is pale golden by candlelight. “Not exactly what I was expecting, but you'll do,” she says. She puts the baby on the soil, struggles to her feet, and with great effort tosses the shell over the high wall of the garden. Then she blows out the candle, tucks the baby into the crook of her arm, and carries him inside. 

The boy grows up in a snug cottage where the hearth fire is always lit, where the cupboards are always filled with food, where the well always draws up either clear cold water or rich cold milk. The boy has three tasks: weed the garden, paint the garden, and guard the garden. He weeds alongside his teacher, the old woman, who shows him how to identify the earliest shoots of plants that are not worthy to grow in her garden. His small fingers are adept at pulling tiny sprigs from the soil and separating clinging tendrils of vines from stone. 

His hands are gifted too at guiding paintbrushes and mixing colors and trimming canvas. The cupboards are always stocked with all the supplies he needs to learn and practice, and they can always hold yet another of his paintings. Each day he works to create another portrait of the garden. White roses, red and pink roses, green leaves and climbing vines, gray stone. There are always new aspects to see, whether in one bud or one plant or an entire bank of roses. Indeed, it seems that the garden becomes more detailed, more richly colored, more solid and warm and finely expressive of its beauty, the more skilled he becomes at painting it. 

His teacher is always happiest when he has completed a painting that so reflects her garden's beauty. She seems to reflect this freshness and liveliness, too, in these moments, and she hugs him and offers him a glass of milk.

To guard the garden, he is to watch for squirrels or birds that try to come from the treetops, over the wall into the garden, and to throw stones at them until they give up and leave. Or, if he is so lucky as to stun or kill one, to toss its little body back over the wall. When he is still very small, he rather likes throwing things and seeing if it has any effect. But he finds that he also likes to watch the creatures' movements and listen to their chatter. It's just the same as how he likes to listen to the sounds and watch the delicate movements of the bees and ladybugs and other insects that he is not supposed to chase away. Sometimes he lets the furred and feathered creatures enter the garden just to watch them more closely, while they flit and nibble around the roses. He means to scare them away eventually, truly he does. But his teacher discovers his distraction and disobedience, and she removes him from guard duty and shouts at him. 

After that, every time a bird or a squirrel makes as if to cross the wall, there is a hissing noise and they are hurled away. “What makes that sound, _ssss_?” he asks. His teacher tells him of snakes, which live in the forest that surrounds the cottage. They slither like huge worms and bite like terrible rose thorns and leave behind venom like unimaginable bee stings. She tells him of packs of wolves and solitary cats and huge birds that eat the dead. His teacher is old and knows about many things that he does not, and so he comes to understand that she protects him and their garden and cottage from everything that is outside in the forest, waiting to strike. 

“I have harnessed their power to protect our walls,” she says. “It was very difficult and tiring, and I would rather that you had been able to guard our walls as I asked you to. But the deed is done now.”

The boy is sorry that he used to let birds and squirrels get into the roses, and he is immensely grateful to have such a wise teacher and protector. He swears to himself that he won't disappoint her again. 

He swears to himself that he will stop missing the squirrels and the birds. Things have come and gone in his life before, after all. He had terrible nightmares when he was young, of blurry screaming things, of formless blobs that struck his body, of nonsense like his teacher with grass for her hair, of looking outside the window to discover that the sky was pink and the roses blue. They were terrifying, but they're gone. And he dreams sometimes now of creatures and biting snakes, but those are gone in the morning. With focus on his weeding and his painting, he trains his mind away from these things.

It's all so endlessly the same, though, after a long time without the squirrels and the birds. That's how his teacher likes it, in both her garden and his paintings: for things to remain the same, or if they change to only become more ideal. For the buds to be more perfect, the stems straighter, the colors purer, the painted details ever truer to life. But never anything other than roses.

A terrible idea takes shape in his mind, one early spring afternoon, weeding in the darkest corner of the garden. His teacher rarely weeds alongside him anymore; she trusts his work.

The boy chooses one weed, there in the narrow corner behind the well. And he lets it grow. Two miniature, slender green leaves reaching up from the soil, that's all. He just wants to see what it will turn into — if it will be beautiful. 

As days go by, the weed produces slender many-part leaves, with so many intricate segments that he feels as if he is getting to see one of the trees with all its leaves, up close for the first time. The leaves rise on tall slim stems, more pliable than all but the youngest rose stems. They form a cloud of fronds that feels soft when he runs his fingers through. He wonders if bird feathers feel this way, or squirrel tails. He runs his hands through his own hair, but that isn't the same at all. He touches the plant again, gently. 

This wonderment is surpassed when the plant creates at the tip of its stem a length that branches and branches again and opens into a dazzling array of tiny white flowers. Together they create one flat flower as big as his palm, the way that the stars in the sky group into clusters, they way birds above the treetops form into flocks, part of a larger whole, their own bright little garden. 

He presses his palm against the top of the flower, wishing he could cradle it in his arms. He has never seen anything so beautiful. He wants to paint it, and he wants to grow another, and he wants to show it to his teacher, and he wants to keep it all to himself. 

He had better keep this to himself. 

But the boy spends too much time wondering about his flower, and becomes slow at weeding. His teacher has had enough of his distraction. She can tell that he is looking at the trees and the sky and all that they might hold. 

“You will no longer leave the cottage,” she says coldly. She spoons stew into his bowl with jerky movements. “You will no longer weed the garden. I will take over. You will stay under the roof. You will observe the garden from the windows, and you will paint, and you will do it perfectly. Do you understand me?”

He is too shocked to answer right away. She slams the bowl down in front of him.

“Are you ungrateful?” she says. “That I make up for your shortcomings? That I try and try to teach you, despite how you fail?”

“I'm sorry,” he whispers. “I am grateful.”

After his teacher is asleep, the boy leaves the cottage for what he understands will be the last time. He finds his weed in the dark corner, its flowers mirroring the stars above. Gently, unyieldingly, he wraps his hand around the leaves and stems and pulls up the plant, root and all. It's a long root like a pale skinny carrot. He cradles the root in his palm. He can't look after and admire this plant anymore, and he will never learn what its seeds look like. He says goodbye, and he throws it over the high wall.

The next morning, and the next and the next, his teacher is tired and short-tempered. And he notices from the window that the soil of the garden takes on a scorched appearance. The brittle dry look extends a hand's breadth up the stems of the roses. He thinks of the hissing sound that protects the walls, and how much he learned about the world when he asked his teacher about it. He forgets that she is tired, and he asks, “What makes that burned look on the earth?”

His teacher snarls and jabs a brand from the fire toward his face. “Would you like to find out?”

He recoils and stumbles away to his painting room. He knows that's where he should be anyway. He knows better than to ask questions. The answer is obvious, anyway: his teacher has harnessed a burning power to prevent weeds from growing in the garden. Weeds like the one he let grow. He just wanted to know where from the world outside the scorching power came from. 

His teacher instructs him to paint the garden without the burned look, and in fact he makes sure to plant the garden as lushly as he can, depicting puddles left from rainstorms and the quiet coziness of fog and the glitter of morning dew. His teacher is very pleased by this, and he feels perhaps he can make up for his faults. But it is so hard to portray the light in a drop of dew when he cannot lie in the garden and observe it closely, when he has to rely only on his memory. 

In frustration, he paints his weed in the corner of the garden, with all the tiny white dots that made up the flower. Then, before his teacher can come into the room, he picks up his gray paint and paints the well in front of the weed, just where it has always stood. 

Hours later, he hears a scream from the garden. He darts to the window and holds onto the sill, not sure if he should go outside the cottage. His teacher is by the well, with her back to him. She doesn't look hurt. But she screams again, and overturns the well bucket. And what pours out of it onto the ground is a mess of skinny things like carrots, pale yellow. The well has somehow drawn up the root of his plant. His plant that is painted beneath the painted well.

He ducks down behind the windowsill, hardly able to breathe. He listens to his teacher stomp along the garden path and into the cottage and into his painting room. His mind is full of the blurry striking things of the nightmares of his earliest years and the beasts that prowl outside the garden walls. Her hand grips the back of his collar and the last of his breath yelps from his throat.

“What have you done?” his teacher hisses in his ear. 

“Are they coming in? Are they coming in?” the boy gasps, desperate.

The hand shakes him a little. “Are _what_ coming in?”

In his heart is a strange little drop of clarity, like dew. “The monsters outside the wall. Why did you scream? Are they coming in?”

He listens to their breaths while waiting for her to answer. His is small and gasping, and hers is loud and slow and constricted like she's stopping herself from screaming there by his ear. 

She drops him, and pushes his shoulder to have him look out the window. The roots are still there by the well. “ _That_ came in.”

He looks at it, obediently, heart pounding. 

“Do you know what it is?”

“A weed?” he ventures. 

It might be the wrong answer. She pushes his shoulder again and grumbles. She inspects all his recent paintings, her movements sharp and harsh, finding nothing that satisfies her. That night, he hears her in the garden, muttering something he cannot hear from his bed.

During the course of the night, he thinks of all the times he has painted the garden with rain puddles, only to wake up in the morning and find that it rained in the night. The times he has painted his teacher's favorite varieties in full bloom because she misses them, only to have the buds spring forth and reach their peak within days. The stones of the walls that he remembers once being mossy and crumbly, though they are clean and sharp-edged today. The fact that he never paints the garden with snow in it, even though it snows outside the garden and on the top of the wall. The violent blobs and mixed-up colors that fill his early memories, and how afraid he was. How similar that felt to how afraid he was today. 

He could paint … what? Himself outside in the garden? His weed, blooming where the roses should be? 

A door in the wall? 

No, no, no. Anything could come in. 

In the morning, breakfast is tense, like a sneaky spreading root that will neither come free of the earth nor break. His teacher is upset and tired. She gets a bundle of carrots, normal carrots, fat and orange, from the cupboard, and dismisses him to his painting room. He can hear her set to chopping them slowly — _snick, pop_ — _snick, pop_ — as he gets out his paints and a fresh canvas.

He isn't exactly sure how to paint something he's never seen. 

_Snick, pop. Snick, pop._

So he paints what he knows. No surrounding soil or stones or plants, no garden at all, just the weed as he remembers it in his hands, its starburst of flowers and intricate leaves and pale yellow root, there in the middle of the blank canvas. 

_Snick, pop. Snick, pop._

Then he sets down his paintbrush and waits. 

_Snick, pop._

A wail of rage. 

The hairs all over his body rise and he shivers. 

“ _Boy!_ ”

He gets to his feet and walks down the hall. 

In the kitchen, his teacher looks over her shoulder at him. Her face is red and her teeth are bared in a grimace. She sounds like she's laughing. There are spilled carrots all over the floor and she still holds the knife in one hand. 

“Boy, I have fed you, housed you, _created_ you.” Her voice grates out between her teeth. “But you leave me no choice. No weed will grow here. I will find out how you've done this. But first I will put you back in the earth I took you from.”

He swallows, frozen, still trying to figure out what his painting has led to. 

His teacher holds up her hand. 

All the fingers have been replaced by roots. The pale woody taproot of his weed. 

She puts the hand down flat on the cutting board. “You see what you make me do.”

_Snick, pop._

The boy runs. 

Out the door of the cottage, down a row of rosebushes that all seem to scream at him with her voice, and momentum carries him halfway up the garden wall. He seizes the thorny vines and pulls himself up, scrambles up to the top of the wall, digging his toes into the stones that seem to scream and shake him just like her. A hissing rises through the blood pumping in his ears. He drops down the other side of the wall, into the forest he's never seen, and lands in a heap. He staggers to his feet and keeps running into the towering trees.

When the stitch in his belly and the rasp in his lungs is too much, he slows to a walk. But ducking between the branches and vines at this pace gives his mind time to notice his feet. He makes his way to a large stone and sits down. 

His feet are torn open by the rough ground of the forest, so unlike the smooth space of the garden. And, looking closer, he sees that they are burned, in just the way that his hands burn if he touches a hot dish out of the oven. They must have burned on the scorching soil of the garden, as if he were simply a weed.

He stares at his feet. At his bramble-torn pants and shirt, his empty pockets, his hands pierced by rose thorns. Then, raising his head, he stares at the huge trunks of trees all around him, at the bushes that are not rosebushes, at the strange hanging vines and mounds of brown leaves piled against fallen-down trunks of trees. He tilts his head back and looks at the canopy of green leaves overhead. They look similar to how they did from the cottage windows, but imposing, blocking the sky so that the morning blue can barely peek through. The trees sway in wind high up over his head, and there are so many more leaves and so much less sunlight. He trembles. 

As his breathing slowly quiets, he realizes that he can hear birdsong. Then the chatter of a squirrel, somewhere far away, and the buzz of an insect in passing.

He wonders if the snakes will appear. He wonders if that will happen before he gets too hungry to move.

A trail of his own blood surely leads from his feet to the wall around the garden. He could follow it back. She might forgive him, might put him in the earth but then unbury a better version of him.

He is afraid he has run in circles, afraid that he will be eaten by beasts, afraid of why he never asked his teacher whether any other people lived in the forest, afraid that any other people would be just like her. He is afraid that he will die suddenly and also that he will die slowly.

He doesn't know if he's doing the right thing, but when he stands up, he walks onto new ground.

When night falls, he sleeps among the crumbling brown leaves on the forest floor. The leaves cover the smell of roses that lingers on his skin.

In the morning, his thoughts are confused and his tongue thick. He finds the ground falling away under his steps, and then suddenly splashing around his ankles. He has walked into a stream of running water and it's numbing his feet. He gets out of the stream, then kneels down beside it and drinks. Until dark, he alternates between drinking water and letting the stream wash his feet and hands. He sleeps by the stream. This seems like a tolerable way to go on, so he lets the next day pass too, curled up by the water, staring up at the birds that move in the trees and the orange tint in the sky at sunset.

A smell wakes him. Something like fruit. His stomach feels more alert than his brain. There is a rustle nearby. He opens his eyes to learn there is a person beside him. 

He shies away, but the person doesn't go in any direction at all. They stare at each other. 

This person is thin and smooth-skinned like him, but with brown skin like the shell of a hazelnut, where his is pale like a broken-open walnut. The person is dressed in a shirt and pants like him, plus boots. Unlike his yellow hair and his teacher's gray hair, the hair trailing over this person's shoulders is black.

A girl, he thinks eventually, resting his head back on the streambank. A woman like his teacher, but very young. That might be the kind of person this is.

The girl extends a hand to him, and for a moment he thinks she has plant material for her fingers too, and he flinches. But held between her brown normal fingers is what looks like a piece of dried apple or pear. It bears the fruity smell from earlier. It might be his only chance at food. He holds it in his mouth for a long time, appreciating it. But when it's gone, she gives him another. He sits up after that and accepts a third. 

The girl studies him while he eats, especially his bare feet. She frowns and takes out of the bag beside her something fabric that she puts in his hands. A folded pair of socks, thick brown wool, much mended. 

“Thank you,” he says, his voice shaking.

She doesn't reply. She fills a bottle with stream water. The boy brushes twigs and dirt from his feet before putting the socks on. Did she understand him? Does she know how to speak? Perhaps she can't hear. He tries to think how a person could be raised in the forest. Where would her things come from, her clothes and the bag and the implements she has beside her? Who would feed her? What creature lives in groups in the forest?

“Did the wolves raise you?” he asks.

She raises her head and glares at him. Her nose flares. Then she looks back down, saying nothing.

“Do you have a cupboard full of food too?” he tries again. She blinks several times, in silence.

The girl puts her water bottle in her bag and situates it and the implements over her shoulders. He realizes that she will go, and he will be left alone again. He keeps his eyes on the socks, and is grateful for the soft wool and the comfort. 

Suddenly her hand is there, palm up, waiting. And when he puts his hand in hers, she hauls him to his feet, even though he turns out to be taller than she is. He feels dizzy. She studies him closely, holding his shoulders. Then she leads him away from the stream.

He has to sit and rest on stones and fallen trees frequently, and she feeds him pears and gives him water and has some herself. Once she walks away from him, motioning with her hands in a way that he takes to mean to _stay put_. Off in the trees, she takes the arc-shaped implement from her back. With a string pulled opposite its curve, she launches a sharp-tipped stick up into the trees. A squirrel falls down with the stick through its eye. She comes back to him, satisfied. He doesn't know what to think. He likes the squirrels when they're alive and moving, but here is one, still warm, that he can touch with his fingers, feel the fur and the sharp little claws and the fluff of the tail, which is not much like the leaves of his weed after all. The girl watches him do this with irritated bafflement, but he can't bring himself to mind. Perhaps what she has just done is what he was supposed to do to keep creatures out of the garden. He is amazed.

As the sun sets and shadows drop beneath the trees, the girl takes him by the hand to try to keep him from stumbling. They cross a small open area and he thinks he sees his flower growing here and there in the half-light. In front of them now is a wall with a door, and he digs his heels in. The girl turns and pulls on his hand, frowning. 

It isn't the cottage he ran from, he knows that. This is a cottage made of wood, entire branches of trees made straight and sealed with earth. There is no high stone wall, no garden without a place for anything but roses. And it seems there are no monsters in the forest, but he knows now that monsters can be inside walls too.

He'd given up on talking to her, but the words creak out of him now, desperate. “Are there other people?”

The girl looks from his face to his white-knuckled grip on her fingers. He can feel his whole body curling in on itself.

The girl draws a breath. “There were,” she says, softly, shocking him. “Other people. They're gone now.”

He tries to breathe. He can feel her looking at him. After awhile, she adds, “They were kind. They let me stay even though they found me in the vegetable garden. But they died a long time ago.”

He nods and drags air in. “I'm … I'm from a rose garden. I had a teacher.” He stops.

She doesn't ask him anything. After a long time, he adds, “I'm gone now.” 

The stars are bright overhead before he can manage to walk with her into the wood cottage. The hearth is cold and empty, but she makes a fire within, and he watches, fascinated. She roasts the meat of the squirrel and splits it between them for a meal, then banks the fire. She lays out pelts and blankets on the floor and gestures him toward them. Her own bed is in the same room, at the far end. The boy listens to her soft breathing for a long time before he falls to sleep.

She doesn't tell him to go away the next day, or the day his feet are healed, or the day she gets from a box under her bed a pair of boots big enough to fit him. She doesn't say much at all.

Things are different here. The fire goes out and must be remade, and she shows him how to ignite it, until he can light a fire just as fast as she can. The well only ever draws water, while milk comes from a tame creature called a goat that lives in a pen behind the hut. Food comes from cupboards only when it's put there first — before that, the girl harvests it from the forest or from the vegetable garden that she spoke of when she brought him home. 

He walks in the forest with her sometimes and learns how to use her bow and arrows and how to set snares. But he prefers to collect the nuts and mushrooms that she shows him. And most of all, he likes to work in her garden. Few plants are weeds. There are so many plants that are worthy to grow there. Even leaves are of value, to eat, and flowers lead to fruit which will lead to roots and seeds and a whole cycle to begin again.

He misses painting, but he doesn't dare try, not even to draw on flat stones with stubs of charcoal from the hearth. He doesn't want anything to happen to the girl. But he misses beauty for its own sake. 

The girl has no use for anything that can't be used. Flowers for anything other than pollination; pelts for anything other than warmth, stitching for anything other than repairs. He puts wildflowers in an empty jar on the mantel and she discards them when she wants to use the jar. He cooks meals with the dry herbs and spices he finds in bottles in the kitchen, and she just says not to use them up before next summer. He points out a rainbow brightening in the sky and she shrugs and confirms that the weather is clearing. He has never seen her smile, even though he has found himself able to smile again. He wonders sometimes if she is more like a forest creature after all, like the squirrels, concerned only with keeping her shelter and stocking up her food.

The shorter days and cooler nights put them together in the hut more often than before, sitting near each other by the hearth. He teaches himself to whittle wood, thinking that might be safe — it isn't painting, it isn't any different really than carving a peg to repair a chair or splitting a length of kindling. Every curl of wood or little shape he creates is easily discarded in the fire, useful as fuel. And this seems to be safe. 

He remembers seeing her linger once over the primroses in the clearing outside the door. She later harvested the seeds for a tincture, but he saw how she touched the petals, and it was with a delicacy she's never touched anything else. He thinks of this as he shapes honey-colored wood into many small flowers on little wooden stems. He gets better at forming their shape as he goes. On the night of the first frost, he fits them into a carefully carved central stem to hold them, with long curls of wood as leaves all down its length. He holds it up to the firelight to evaluate it, to see if it looks right. 

Beside him, he hears the girl suck in a breath. He looks up, but she gets to her feet and darts around the room like a trapped bird, then goes to the door. She stumbles out and doesn't close it behind her. 

He hears her gasp again. In dread, he goes to the door. 

Springing out of the hard frost across the entire clearing are flowers that he knows even in the dark are yellow, as if warm from the last of the sunlight. Primroses. They gleam in the starlight, in the firelight spilling from the open door. The girl's footsteps crunch across the frost and she crouches down amid the flowers.

He edges after her. “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'll fix it, I'll find a way —”

She looks up. He can see glints of light reflecting off her cheeks, but her expression is open, nothing stony or hidden. He stops talking. She says unevenly, “You made these appear?”

“I — probably. I can try to fix it. I'm so sorry — ”

She shakes her head and sniffles. Looks around again at the primroses, the frost, the brilliant stars above. “No, this is perfect.” She laughs, suddenly, through her tears. “This is beautiful.”

She stands and looks, and he watches her, until she's shivering. He takes her hand and leads her back inside. He wraps her in a blanket and makes her tea. She wipes her cheeks and smiles at him.

During the winter nights, she tells him, in bits and pieces, about the sister she had, named for the primrose, who is buried in the meadow. During the days, if the sun is bright, he tells her one or two things about the life he used to have.

In the spring, he sees tiny two-leaved plants begin at the edge of the garden. He knows now what they'll turn into. The girl finds him hunched over them. He tells her the story of the weed that was not fit to be in the garden. 

She knows the way to a stone wall with no doors, a place that smells of roses. But it is a long time before he can make the walk with her. 

What they find in the depths of the forest is a fallen pile of stones. Here the lines of the walls, there the chimney and hearth, and there the well with the rotted wood of the well cap atop it. There is a dry ashy crumble of vines and thorns, and nothing new has grown. It is a dead spot in the forest, and it looks as though it died a hundred years ago.

All around outside the walls, right up to the trunks of the trees, are weeds. Wildflowers and sweet grasses. They don't grow in the rose garden, but they grow everywhere it isn't, and they are the ones that have survived in the end.


End file.
